Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

By: Marilynne Robinson

Narrated by: Tim Jerome

Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2005

National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction, 2005

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War", then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father, an ardent pacifist, and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision, not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

©2004 Marilynne Robinson (P)2005 BBC Audiobooks America, Published by Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC

Critic reviews

" Gilead is a beautiful work: demanding, grave, and lucid...Robinson's words have a spiritual force that's very rare in contemporary fiction." ( The New York Times Book Review)
"The long wait has been worth it....Robinson's prose is beautiful, shimmering, and precise....Destined to become her second classic." ( Publishers Weekly)
"[ Gilead] is so serenely beautiful, and written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read it." ( The Washington Post Book World)

Narrator

I really had a hard time getting into this book. I wanted to love it. I really wanted to enjoy it, but the narrator has one mode for the character, and he never really deviates from that. In so many ways the voice of the narrator suits the character: deep, old, pensive. But the inflections and emotions become so repetitive, so predictable, the humanity John Ames’ character is supposed to have never takes root in this medium and he becomes a 2-dimensional character in the hands of this narrator. I’m going to read this book on paper so I can get a better sense of John Ames and his life and reflections.

An okay book

It was thought provoking, but often it was mundane, and void of a story to hook me and drag me along, out of a lake.

unexpected. revered

selfawareness is difficult as described by the reverend. how well can we know ourselves. how can we truly know as nother. kudos.

An old man's musings

Marilynne Robinson is the most lyrical novelist working today. Pretty much all the action is interior--the musings of an old man in an old town. But the fineness of his perceptions and his gentle moral rigor are given full play and in prose that is fine and precise, like the best of scalpels.

Beautiful moments, but not very dramatic.

I read a number of reviews and thought I would love this book. It was OK. It's nice to read a pleasant work of fiction that looks into Christian values. There were moments I thought were insightful, but I was mostly bored listening to this.

The narrator was the right selection, I just didn't find the plot very engaging.

A most enjoyable epistolary novel!

Full of beautiful colloquialisms from my childhood. A comfortable and enjoyable book worth reading.

Beautiful

Beautiful prose and story. The author wove such an intricate narrative through a deceptively simple device (old man’s letter to his child). Narrator also had a great voice.

A book for dreaming over

Usually, I gobble books. Not this one. Exquisitely written, it begs the reader to pause, to ponder, to wonder, to marvel. So delicate, like leaves rustling in a light breeze. As the narrator ponders his life, so you cannot help but ponder your own. Here is a book full of spirit, a sermon if you like, without the preaching down to the reader. Instead it is an invitation to think with compassion about oneself, one's failings, one's relationships with God and man. Amazing.

A story filled with truth

This book was much more than a heart warming story, it was a story filled with truth and wisdom. It's about an old man writing both his memoirs and a diary to his only son before he dies about his extraordinary life as a pastor who genuinely loved, not only his "flock" but people in general. Although his father and grandfather were clergy, in the end, he was left with conflicting, confusing examples of right and wrong. Wanting to do the right thing at the end of his life, he wasn't sure what was always right. How does one really love? What does love really mean? In his struggle to find the way, he leads us as well. This book has insight and meaning into life and love. It's a most worthwhile and fun listen.

Ramblings of old memories

Ramblings of an old minister....interesting to only his family.
I found it repetitive and not really that interesting!